Disfranchisement and Democracy: A History
By This is a fantastic piece by the great historian of Reconstruction Greg Downs on the long and winding history of voter registration, voter participation, the purposeful narrowing of the American electorate over time, and the myths we tell ourselves about American democracy:
“When Americans treat voter disfranchisement as a regional, racial exception, they sustain their faith that the true national story is one of progressive expansion of voter rights. But turn-of-the-20th-century disfranchisement was not a regional or a racial story; it was a national one. Even though rebels perfected the art of excluding voters, it was yankees who developed the script. During the 1901 convention, Alabama delegates circulated copies of Massachusetts’ voting laws with the Bay State’s grandfather clause, literacy test, registration requirement, and secret ballots, all intended to make voting more difficult for immigrants. These Massachusetts laws worked, if not quite as well as they did in Alabama; voter turnout fell from 55 to 41 percent.
The tools that broke American democracy were not just the Ku Klux Klan’s white sheets, vigilantes’ Red Shirts, and lynch mobs’ nooses; they were devices we still encounter when we vote today: the registration roll and the secret, official ballot. Along with exclusions of felons and permanent resident aliens, these methods swept the entire United States in the late 19th century, reducing nationwide voter participation from about 80 percent to below 50 percent by the 1920s. Despite the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and increasing voter mobilization, turnout in the United States has never recovered; by one 2018 survey, the country ranks 26th of 32 developed democracies in participation.”
Later:
“Was the story of Alabama — of the South — the story of the United States? Which is another way of asking this: Was the United States a democratic nation? In the landmark case Shelby County v. Holder, Chief Justice John Roberts turned the disfranchisement of the 1890s into a racial and regional exception, one that had since been overwhelmed by the national tide of democracy. “Our country has changed,” Roberts wrote in the majority opinion. This is part of what political scientist Alexander Keyssar critically called the “progressive presumption” that there is an “inexorable march toward universal suffrage” interrupted only by anomalous, even un-American, regional and racial detours. Is it better to think that the United States is democratic when it isn’t distracted by racism? Or to think that the United States might not be democratic at all?”
The whole is very long, but very worth it.